Review:

There are a few places I have no desire whatsoever to visit. Actually, my bucket list explicitly endorses maintaining successful avoidance of the following locales (in no particular order): the Middle East, the campus of Penn State, the entirety of Africa, the state of Alabama, and, because I don't have a penchant for ladyboy prostitutes (yet), Bangkok, Thailand. Nothing good ever seems to happen in these places (see Brokedown Palace, Ebola, Sandusky, Midnight Express, ISIS, incest, and The Hangover Part II).

Enter Cam2Cam, an ambitious movie that starts off with a riveting bang and ends with an unfortunate convoluted whimper. Lucy, a stupid American visiting Thailand, does stupid things on her computer, and ends up dying a stupid yet horrendous death. Her sister Allie, another stupid American (but only slightly less stupid), travels to Bangkok in order to find her sis' decapitated noggin and bring justice to her killer. A very promising tense opening act is rapidly squandered by subsequent poor creative choices and suspect plot developments. I don't want to spoil much, but the killer subplot is wrapped up fairly early on in the film, leaving Allie to spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out what, if any, connection a group of annoying club kids and burn outs has to do with her sister's death.

The direction is competent, the setting is appropriately seedy, and the female lead is cute as hell, but other than that, Cam2Cam flounders about like a flaccid ladyboy's penis after one too many estrogen injections. One other gripe is the annoying use of misspelled words whenever they show their typed conversations on the screen. Does it really take that much more time to properly spell words when you are chatting with someone online? Perhaps it does take a little longer, but common courtesy should dictate proper grammar and syntax even when chatting it up with your eventual killer. If only Lucy fully spelled out her words like “sry” and “undrstnd” then she might still be alive today.

Cam2Cam feels like a movie that should have come out 10 years ago during the height of internet predator hysteria. Sure, there are still perverts out there that get off on luring women and children into their vans from the interwebs for nefarious purposes, but these cautionary tales about the evils of the net seem irrelevant now that the public has become much more hardened and savvy. There really doesn't appear to be much of a real problem of dopes getting snookered on webcam sites anymore, unless you are completely naïve as to how computers work. And I don't mean just the internet, but a computer itself. Like if you just came out of a forty-year coma, or were some backwoods Russian immigrant who spent the last few decades wearing solely a babushka and eating raw beets out of the back of your oxen-cart. You know, someone who would pick up the mouse and speak into it, or try and wipe the monitor with a rag in a futile attempt to erase the screen.